A friend of mine went out of town recently and returned with a tale of seeing a woman confront her misbehaving youngster by saying, “Mommy doesn’t appreciate the choices you’re making.”

As a parenting technique, that might be effective if your pre-schooler has been immersed in Kant’s theories of free will and categorical imperative. Otherwise, it’s completely inane. What parent seeks to negotiate with a young child over “choices”?

Sadly, many modern parents don’t seem to have a clue about how to raise children. You can find proof of that in a recent article in Newsweek, which reports that moms and dads nowadays pay impressive sums of money to “parent coaches” for tips on child-rearing. The article begins by describing how the parents of a five-year-old girl wondered how to keep their daughter from bullying her friends who come over to play. The adults

turned to a parent coach. For $75 an hour ($100 for an introductory session), Sally Kidder Davis of Sound Parent (soundparent.com) met with [the parents] to talk through potential solutions. One was to talk to Kate about the importance of being a responsible hostess. If she couldn’t help her guests enjoy themselves, she couldn’t have them over. The strategy worked.

Let me get this straight: This couple ponied up hundreds of dollars to have somebody tell them to simply explain to their daughter that if she couldn’t be nice to her playmates, they couldn’t come over anymore? People actually pay for that “advice”?

It gets worse. The story’s author recounts her own experience with a parent coach:

I explained that my 2-year-old daughter threw tantrums whenever her father wanted to put her to bed instead of me. Of course, we cave in every time. The coach suggested giving our daughter plenty of warning the next time her dad wanted to do the bedtime routine. Perhaps my husband could take her to the bookstore to pick out some new reading material just for them. Then we should follow through no matter how much she protests. (We have yet to muster the courage to try this.)

They’re afraid of their two-year-old. Imagine what that household will be like when the child is fifteen.

Some people apparently are unwilling to acknowledge a basic reality: Young children are feral, selfish, amoral creatures who live only for self-gratification. The good news, though, is that they can be trained. Having a toddler is like having a really smart dog — it can learn things quickly, and it benefits from structure. But you have to keep in mind that you’re a parent, not a pal. Your child is not going to like you sometimes. Deal with it.

The payoff comes later, when your children are well-adjusted, thoughtful, considerate adults. That’s when they make great pals.

That’ll be $100, please. Checks happily accepted.

I can’t say I’m surprised by the impenetrable wording of the announcement that went out to the News & Observer staff yesterday, in which buyouts were announced. God knows I read my share of such memos during 14 years at the N&O, and without fail they were models of obfuscation and indirection. But this most recent one, issued by publisher Orage Quarles, sets a new standard for the genre. (Notice, for instance, that the word “buyout” doesn’t appear anywhere.)

Here’s the announcement in full, with translation:

Like many newspapers around the country, we are experiencing great change and challenges. We are facing more competition, our traditional business model is changing in the digital age, and basically our industry is going through a fundamental transition.

Actually, our industry has been in fundamental transition for 10 years, but we happily lived in a state of denial because we were still making money and we figured that if we just kept reminding people how important we are — you know, that whole guardian of the public trust thing — then everything would be OK. D’oh!

While we remain committed to our print product, we are focusing more attention on our online and niche products.

We’re stuck with paper for a while because, frankly, we still haven’t figured out how to make any real money online. But have you heard about the new magazine we’re bringing out? It’s called Skirt. We’re hoping that giving it a name with fetish-porn overtones will get us some buzz. That’s niche, baby! We’ll always be (wink, wink) the guardians of the public trust, though. You can count on that. (Wink, wink.)

In order to support these efforts we must continue to look for ways to operate more efficiently. This leads to a realignment of resources and changes in many of our business practices.

We’ve been realigning our asses off for more than a year now. We’re hoping we got it right this time.

To help achieve this realignment, we have decided to offer a voluntary transition program for work areas, positions or work groups where jobs would not need to be replaced if vacated due to new technology, efficiencies and/or consolidation of job functions.

“Voluntary transition” sounds much more elegant that “buyout,” don’t you think, staffers? No? Well, how’s the word “layoff” sound to you?

This program is limited in scope and there will be department limits so that no one area is unfairly impacted by reductions.

Of course, we reserve the right to define “unfairly.”

While there are limits on the number of employees who may be offered this package, there is not a minimum “target” that we are required to achieve.

Of course we know the total number of people who need to be pushed out the door. We’re just not gonna tell you how many it is.

This program does not become involuntary if a certain number of employees do not volunteer.

The first person who can diagram that clumsy sentence properly gets to keep his job.

However, this does not preclude the possibility of The News & Observer identifying efficiencies or other business model changes that could impact staffing in the future.

There will be more blood. Don’t be so foolish as to believe this is the end of it.

Eligible employees will receive an information packet about the program from Human Resources this afternoon. Employees who are approved for the program will work through Friday, May 23, unless otherwise notified by Human Resources because of business needs.

If we can get you out of here sooner, we will.

We see this as an opportunity for those who may have a desire to pursue other interests, while addressing the newspaper’s need to respond to a changing business model.

You get the opportunity to be unemployed, while we buy ourselves more time to figure out whether Skirt’s gonna do the trick for us.

Whenever I hear a progressive soul declare, “I support the troops,” I’m instantly skeptical.

In most cases, I’m not buying what they’re selling. Every time I hear that phrase, it sounds like an inadvertent revelation of true feeling — sort of like when somebody says, “I have lots of black friends.” You hear that, you can almost always be sure it’ll be immediately followed by some bigoted remark.

It’s possible to both support the troops and oppose their current mission in Iraq, of course. A childhood friend of mine, a well-regarded screenwriter, can be caustic about the Bush administration’s conduct of the war, but he’s genuinely supportive of military people. He’s a veteran himself, and understands the value and purpose of a well-trained military.

But when the N.C. Bankers Association announced plans to sponsor a parade in Raleigh this past weekend, a flurry of letters to the editor of the News & Observer made clear that many people simply can’t abide what the military is, and does. There was this declaration, for instance:

Is this a salute to our troops or a salute to our violent capability and an opportunity to promote violence to our youth? … Showing off our killing machines doesn’t strike me as a way to entertain the community.

Ma’am, if you subtract the “violent capability” that is the U.S. military from the world altogether, is it a better place? Ask any Kosovar or any non-Taliban Afghan — or for that matter, any European old enough to remember the Second World War — and get back to me.

Then there was this:

The upcoming Salute to our Troops is right out of the playbook of the German military leaders of the 1930s, designed to build support for an ever-increasing militarization of the nation to be financed by the taxpayers.

Forget about the noxious equating of the military with Nazi storm troopers; this guy may not have understood that civilians (specifically, bankers) organized the parade as a thank-you to military families. But I’m being generous here. He probably did know that, and didn’t care. The military is evil, you see, and strict adherence to fact is a luxury when you’re fighting evil.

Want more? Try this one:

Eager to deflect growing discontent with the Iraq War, the military was happy to answer the call when the bankers put forth a plan to host what can only be called a celebration of war.

Oh, please. If firemen drive their trucks in a parade, can it “only be called” a celebration of fire?

This stuff is not just nonsense. It’s fatuous, hysterical nonsense.